OpEd: Where refugees found safety, ICE brought fear

By Thomas Lee

Editor’s Note: AsAmNews Be Curious columnist Thomas Lee lives in Minneapolis and will be reporting on Renee Nicole Good’s death at the hands of ICE. This is the first of several columns on the issue.

For someone like Bao Phi, history has a way of repeating itself. Again. And again.

That is the moral burden Phi carries as someone who arrived in Minnesota as a refugee in 1975. He and his parents were fleeing the chaos of the Vietnam War after Communist forces under Ho Chi Minh finally routed South Vietnam.

After arriving in Minnesota, Phi grew up safely, graduated from Macalester College in St. Paul, and built a distinguished career as a writer and poet who often explores the refugee experience.

On a Sunday afternoon, I asked Phi to meet me at Powderhorn Park in central Minneapolis just before the start of a protest against ICE’s massive operation in the Twin Cities. That campaign culminated in an ICE agent fatally shooting Rene Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother who had confronted federal agents.

It wasn’t much of a stretch for Phi to connect the ICE campaign to his own past experiences as a refugee intimately familiar with state-sanctioned violence.

“You see the pattern of both injustice and, I think, callousness that is an echo of things that have happened to many different communities, including ours before,” Phi told me. “For the longest time, I didn’t really deal with the fact that I was born in a war because I was too young at the time to have a conscious memory of it. But as we know, trauma like that gets passed down.”

“When I became a father, I became much more aware of all of it,” he continued. “When George Floyd was murdered, I felt both sick and in complete despair, and at times anger. When Renee was killed, I literally felt sick. That’s probably a trauma response—but I hope that’s also a human response. The fact that these things happened right here in our neighborhood, where my child grew up, where so many people I care about live—it would be terrible anywhere, but all of this piled together makes it very difficult.”

People across the country may see the Twin Cities as just another region where the Trump administration has conducted immigration raids, alongside Boston, Chicago, New York, and Portland, Oregon.

But the raids strike at something uniquely essential to Minnesota’s civic identity.

The state has long been home not just to immigrants, but to refugees—people fleeing violence and displacement in their home countries. Thanks to a network of Lutheran and Catholic relief groups and mutual-aid organizations, refugees from Liberia, Somalia, and Southeast Asia—including Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, and Myanmar—have created new lives in Minnesota.

Over decades, the state has built a professional civic infrastructure to receive refugees and help them assimilate into American life. It’s why these communities have opened businesses, graduated from colleges like Phi did, and entered political life—including Ilhan Omar, the first Somali American elected to Congress, and Kaohly Vang Her, who recently became the first Hmong American mayor of St. Paul.

This history isn’t incidental. It is the moral infrastructure of the state—and it’s precisely what the ICE raids disrupt.

Thousands of protesters cited that history as they marched from Powderhorn Park to the site of Good’s killing on Portland Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets.

There is something darker at work here than immigration enforcement alone. Trump and Stephen Miller—his deputy chief of staff and the chief architect of the administration’s immigration crackdown—are not opposed to immigration in the abstract. They have made clear distinctions about which immigrants they believe belong in America.

White immigrants from Europe or South Africa have never posed a problem. Non-white immigrants from what Trump infamously called “sh*thole countries” are treated differently.

“The Refugee Act of 1980 has been one of the gravest historical calamities,” Miller tweeted on December 31. “It flooded America with ‘refugees’ from the world’s failed societies, created a vast federally funded NGO network to support them, granted uncapped welfare, and created a fast track to citizenship.”

You can see why Miller is particularly focused on Minnesota.

What he fails to note is why many of those societies “failed” in the first place. The instability in countries like Vietnam and Somalia did not arise in isolation; it followed decades of European and American colonial intervention, military conflict, and racialized policy.

Liberia, for instance, was founded in 1847 by freed American slaves, encouraged by prominent White Americans who believed Black and White people could not peacefully coexist in the United States.

As Phi points out, Minnesota’s acceptance of refugees has never been pure charity—it reflects moral obligation. Many Vietnamese refugees had supported the United States during the war and reasonably feared retaliation after it ended. The Hmong, a stateless people, secretly aided U.S. forces in Laos. Relocating them to America was not generosity; it was the bare minimum of responsibility.

“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, refugees—it’s out of the goodness of our hearts,’” Phi said. “That’s part of it. But Southeast Asian people are here due to military and cultural colonial interventions by America and European countries. In some cases, our people were actually allied with the United States. So it’s not charity. It’s honoring the actual relationship. People on the right forget that part.”

So when Trump and Miller send ICE agents into Minnesota to round up “illegals,” they are not just targeting individuals—they are attacking remembrance itself: the memory of alliances made, debts incurred, and responsibilities assumed.

The raids have already damaged Minnesota’s reputation as a safe place to escape violence and chaos, a reputation earned through decades of trust with refugee communities.

“I’m an American citizen, even though I was born elsewhere,” Phi said. “I have a middle-class job, and yet I carry three forms of ID with me at all times. I have plans for what should happen if something happens to me—who’s going to let my kid know? Who’s going to let my family know?”

“That’s rough dude,” he added. “Because of the shape of my eyes and the color of my skin, I have to be on my toes and look out for myself and my family.”